“I’ll pay you twelve million dollars.”

He stopped laughing.

She explained: she did not need a boyfriend.

She needed a shield — someone to help her survive her own company’s board.

Someone inside Meridian was staging a quiet coup to remove her as CEO while she was too sick to fight on every front at once, and the story they were leaking to the big investors was simple and devastating: a critically ill, isolated young woman with no support system cannot be trusted to lead thirty-eight hundred people.

“I need them to stop seeing a dying heiress,” Ifeoma said.